Macbook Pro and new HDD

[ventuss]

I have two MacBooks, both of them have single platter (160GB/250GB) Hitachi Travelstar drives inside, and you can' t hear anything but total silence.

I bought a Samsung Spinpoint M8 750GB and Hitachi Travelstar 750GB (same model as the stock). The problem is that neither is as quiet as the original disks. The Samsung write/read noise is pretty annoying.

Why is that? How can an old 160GB HDD from 2009 be quieter than both Samsung and Hitachi new models. Is there anything I might have done wrong?

 

[NazgulRR]

You found the answer yourself: single platter drives are quiter than two or three platter drives.

I too have a single platter 250GB drive (Toshiba) in my MBP that is dead silent. I bought WD Scorpio 500GB (two platter) to replace it later, but just couldn't stand the noise. Few months ago I seeked out the biggest single platter drive: Toshiba 320GB. It was not only as silent as the original 250GB, but faster too. But alas, 320GB is not enough for me. I would need around 750GB.

At the moment, I think 500GB drives are the biggest single platter drives on the market.

Let me know if you come across a good high capacity and quiet drive .

 

[ventuss]

Samsung Spinpoint M8 is very quiet when I am just using Safari and some simple softwares, but when it starts working hard it's like having a cat trapped inside the MacBook digging its way out.

I have filled 600GB of my new 750GB drive, thanks to my iTunes Library. I don't know what to do since it is a matter of time until I need more space, and even 1TB will not be enough.

 

[dusk007]

While I think the a 320GB single platter drive is still quite audible it is obviously more quiet than a mulit platter drive. I have the M8 2 platter 500GB and yes there is more seek noise.
If you want to shut the seek noise down you can change the AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) settings to quite. It trades some latency for less seek noise.
You'd need the Samsung ES Tool... find it with google.

The performance loss isn't too great but it will benchmark a bit slower. Idle noise doesn't change obviously, seek noise should but by how much you'd have to find out for yourself.

 

[ventuss]

So there is idle, write, read, and seek noise? seek noise is the state where the drive is working for normal tasks? I google it and there is not a mac os x version of ES Tools. If I do that in bootcamp will also affect mac os?